Nayeon Ryu

Chipping her ball at a target, junior Ava Pfeil shows off her skills at Red and Blue night. This is her first year on the team, one of six new people on JV. “I decided to join [golf] because I wanted to do another sport in the fall [in addition to cheer] and golf seemed like the most fun one because you can chill with friends and relax,” Pfeil said. “My favorite part of the season has been the team bonding because since we’re a small team we can get really close.”

With only three matches left in the season, the junior varsity (JV) girls’ golf team remains undefeated with an 8-0 record.

There are 10 girls on the JV team, a somewhat large number compared to their seven-player team from last season, but a small team compared to other sports. Overall, there are only 17 girls on both varsity and JV.

“I joined golf in the hopes of making closer friends than I made on volleyball, and so far it’s working,” sophomore Sophie Duenez said. “Because we’re such a small team, it’s a lot easier to get to know everyone even though we don’t do that much team bonding.”

Since the team is small, they drive themselves to matches and practices after school that can be up to 45 minutes away.

“The drives to matches can be super long, but they’re always fun,” freshman Kayla Reuther said. “I play music that the upperclassmen don’t like, but that’s their fault because they hand me the aux cord. It definitely makes us a lot closer than if we took a bus.”

The winning streak has come seemingly out of the blue, with a few matches at the beginning of the season won by only a few strokes. Central was defeated by four strokes, 232-236, and Eureka by only six strokes, 205-211.

“The first couple wins were fun, but now it’s getting serious,” Reuther said. “We had a lot of anxiety at our match against Northwest Tuesday. We were standing around our coach, watching her add the points up and holding our breath because they were really good and we didn’t know if we were going to win.”

Eighty percent of players join the girl’s team with little or no previous experience. Add to that the fact that all of the seniors comprise the varsity team, and you get a JV team made up of mostly newcomers. Six out of their 10 players just started playing golf this summer.

“I bought my clubs the day before tryouts week started. I had never played before and now I can actually hit a ball,” junior Umeera Farooq said.

In a typical golf match, only the lowest four scores count towards the team score, and the person from both teams with the lowest score is the medalist. Despite their experience, the team has managed to impress Ladies Professional Golfers Association (LPGA) professional and JV coach Jill Bertram.

“I thought the team would have a good season, but we had good teams sprinkled throughout the season so I wasn’t expecting [them to be] undefeated,” Bertram said. “We have a lot of depth this year. A new junior player, Ava Pfeil, has had her score count in almost all matches she has played. We have two freshmen: Caroline Bergh, who has had her score used in matches, and Kayla Reuther, who was a medalist in our last match. All 10 players can contribute at any time.”

Even with the threat of playing against schools with better averages than them looming, the team remains optimistic about the season they’ve had thus far.

“No matter what happens, we’ve had a good season so far. Being undefeated is amazing, but even if we lose all the rest of our matches we’ll still have a winning season,” junior Catherine Widowski said. “Our entire varsity is leaving after this year, and if we can keep playing like this we have a lot to look forward to in filling their shoes.”